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Re: Conlang Unicode Font (was Re: Kamakawi Unicode Font Question)

From:Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Saturday, March 8, 2008, 6:39
On 08/03/08 16:45:50, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> > On Mar 7, 2008, at 5:36 AM, Tristan McLeay wrote: > > > > The insuperable problem is that unfortunately OpenType, the main > > modern > > font format, doesn't support all its features everywhere. Automatic > > ligatures apparently don't happen if the unligated characters are > in > > the PUA. Another problem is that Latin handwriting fonts can't > > use context-sensitive glyphs the way Arabic fonts do (for instance, > my > > cursive p and b are open when a letter follows, but closed when > they > > don't --- you can't tell an OpenType font to automatically do > that). > > How is it that such a font can produce ligatures when e.g. <f> is > followed by <i> or <fl>, but not vary the look of <p> and <b> > depending on what follows?
The difference is that fi and ffl form ligatures, so we combine both the first and second characters into a new one. With open-versus-closed p, we're replacing only the p based on the context; we want the open variant if any Latin alphabetic character follows, and closed p otherwise. However, as to the details I provided in the last post, I might have been slightly wrong in that discussion. From this page: <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/editexample6-5.html#Conditional> it would seem that some OpenType implementations support conditional variants in all scripts, and others don't. If I understand it, the standard doesn't require it, but there's nothing to stop a complying implementation from supporting it, other than lack of imagination on the implementer's part. -- Tristan.